In response to: The Unforgettable Fire: Tradition and the Shape of the Law
Professor DeGirolami has written an interesting Liberty Forum essay in behalf of paying respectful attention to tradition as a major aspect of our legal order. However, I think there are two major problems with it. The first is theoretical, particularly in relation to the American political and legal experience. The second has to do with actual practices or examples. The essay, albeit interesting, is written from a lofty perspective; there are too few concrete examples that truly allow the reader to ascertain the implications of his argument. Almost always, when it comes to politics or law, the devil (or saving…
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Marc DeGirolami’s Liberty Forum essay discusses two contexts in which tradition might influence American law: common law and constitutional law. He suggests that tradition is still robust in the former, less so in the latter. With regard to common law, I think that he’s right that custom underlies a good deal of the law of contracts,…
In the first paragraph of his celebrated 1881 book on the common law, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” Nor was that the first such expression in the annals of American jurisprudence. At the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, James Madison recorded John Dickinson’s…